Call for Papers - Critical Ethnic Studies

Critical Ethnic Studies provides a space for unique and insurgent critique within ethnic studies. It explores the guiding question of The Critical Ethnic Studies Association, which is: how do the histories of colonialism and conquest, racial chattel slavery, and white supremacist patriarchies and heteronormativities affect, inspire, and unsettle scholarship and activism in the present? By staking a unique interest in interdisciplinary scholarship that repositions the guiding assumptions of other fields, this journal will appeal to scholars interested in the new methodologies, philosophies, and discoveries of this new intellectual formation. The journal is published bi-annually by the University of Minnesota Press. Its current Co-Editors are: John D. Marquez and Junaid Rana.

We seek to publish essays that address one or more of the following criteria:

1) That link and productively expand the rubrics of what has been called “identitarian” scholarship (e.g. Asian American Studies, African American Studies, etc). To this end, we seek projects that will help to untether ethnic studies from the limitations of neoliberal multicultural institutionalization within the academy, which often relies on a politics of identity representation that is diluted and domesticated by nation-building and capitalist imperatives. We welcome essays that advance relational and global frameworks for analyzing racism and colonialism, and those that shed a critical light on the extra-national effects of globalization and privatization, as well as structural redevelopment programs on people of color.

2) That engage in a productive dialogue with critical native/indigenous studies. We seek to publish essays that unsettle discussions of race, civil rights, immigration, labor exploitation, and the discourse of inclusion and exclusion tend to presume settler colonialism as the transparent, taken-for-granted, and therefore un-interrogated ground or terrain.

3) That critically theorize race beyond understandings of "race" as a descriptive (sociological) category. Such understandings attempt to explain race and racism, but often simply describe them. By explicitly foregrounding white supremacy and settler colonialism as a logic and social formation intimately abetted by race and racism, we hope to provide trenchant critiques of how and why race and racism persist and not merely state or describe their persistence.

4) That integrate critical feminist, queer, and trans studies with ethnic studies. Critical Ethnic Studies is an intersectional project that sees categories such as race, class, gender, and sexuality not as additive modes of identity, oppression, or discrimination, but rather as constitutive, as robust analytics for critically apprehending and theorizing alternatives. The journal would be a crucial place for the specific interventions being made to counteract the lack of gender and sexuality studies in ethnic studies, as well as the lack of attention to race theory within feminist, queer, and sexuality studies.